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In 1964, Paul G. Chevigny left a standard job at a Wall Avenue legislation agency to volunteer for the Freedom Summer time of civil rights activism in Mississippi.
What he noticed within the Deep South, the place efforts to register Black voters met with violence, modified his life. He deserted company legislation and opened the Harlem Neighborhood Authorized Help Mission on West one hundred and thirty fifth Avenue.
In Mississippi and in Harlem, Mr. Chevigny’s eyes have been opened to a stage of police brutality that was usually skilled by Black residents of poor communities, however that many white Individuals had no information of.
In 1966 he started working for the New York Civil Liberties Union, the place he turned one of many nation’s foremost specialists on police abuse and a number one civil rights lawyer, profitable landmark instances limiting police interference with First Modification rights.
Mr. Chevigny — who wrote a seminal guide on abusive policing, “Police Energy”; who defended Attica jail rioters and Black Panthers; and who as a professor at New York College Legislation College based one of many first human rights clinics at an American legislation college — died on Monday at his residence in Manhattan. He was 88.
His daughter Blue Sevigny confirmed the demise.
“His main influence was on recognizing and writing powerfully in regards to the systemic existence of police abuse,” Burt Neuborne, a former nationwide authorized director of the American Civil Liberties Union, mentioned in an interview. “He was the primary of the wave of civil rights attorneys who noticed that.”
In “Police Energy,” revealed in 1969, Mr. Chevigny wrote that, whereas most individuals in all probability considered police brutality as a deliberate act, “The reality is that many incidents of the usage of drive by policemen bear an unlucky resemblance to assaults by personal residents; they’re hotheaded reactions to an actual or imagined insult.” However premeditated or not, he maintained, police brutality prolonged “the police function as an instrument of authority in society.”
Mr. Chevigny’s 11 years on the New York Civil Liberties Union coincided with a fruitful period for social justice advances, formed by a liberal judiciary open to new readings of the Structure and by the civil rights, ladies’s rights and antiwar actions, which profoundly shook up society.
Along with the weighty enterprise of police abuse, Mr. Chevigny discovered time in his profession to deliver instances aimed toward New York Metropolis’s restrictions on nightlife, primarily based on free-expression arguments.
Colleagues described him as harking back to Columbo, the tv detective performed by Peter Falk: distracted and typically cranky, however far sharper than his method instructed.
“He was all the time shambling round till he was standing in your throat,” Mr. Neuborne mentioned. “After I was a really younger lawyer, I went to see him argue a few instances. On the way in which to the courthouse he’d say, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do.’ After which he’d get up and ship this splendidly sensible argument.”
In 1971, Mr. Chevigny and different attorneys sued the New York Metropolis Police Division over its surveillance of political exercise, a decades-long spying marketing campaign that got here to gentle throughout a trial of members of the Black Panther Celebration, who have been acquitted. The police’s so-called Pink Squad had over time gathered dossiers on plenty of people that had attended anti-Vietnam Warfare protests, signed petitions, written articles or gone to conferences. After greater than a decade of litigation, the town in 1985 signed a consent decree, often called the Handschu settlement, which restricted police spying and undercover operations.
“His general theme was: Who will guard the guardians? Who will watch over the folks watching over us?” mentioned Jethro M. Eisenstein, a lawyer who labored with Mr. Chevigny on the Handschu settlement, which continues to be in impact.
In 1977, in one other essential First Modification case, Black v. Codd, Mr. Chevigny received a consent decree that gave observers of police actions the precise to take footage, write down badge numbers and make feedback with out being harassed or arrested.
That 12 months, Mr. Chevigny joined the school at New York College Legislation College, the place he turned a full professor in 1981. He led a authorized clinic in human rights, by which college students represented actual shoppers.
Alongside together with his spouse, Bell Gale Chevigny, a professor of literature on the State College of New York at Buy, Mr. Chevigny broadened his examine of police violence to 3rd world cities. The couple have been co-authors of two studies for the human rights group Americas Watch: “Police Abuses in Brazil” (1987) and “Police Violence in Argentina” (1991).
In 1995, Mr. Chevigny revealed a second influential guide, “Fringe of the Knife,’’ an formidable examine of police violence in six cities within the Americas.
“I felt I had a sort of mission with the police drawback,” he mentioned in an interview with The New York Occasions in 1988. “It appeared to me that police abuses have been the results of some systemic social drawback. I discovered that society wasn’t beneficiant sufficient to unravel its inequalities, so it calls for a specific amount of management, and it calls on the police to do its soiled work.”
All his life, Mr. Sevigny was an aficionado of jazz and blues. Within the Eighties, throughout a go to to a jazz membership on the Higher West Aspect, he realized in regards to the metropolis’s Prohibition-era Cabaret Legislation.
That legislation required any venue the place music or dancing passed off and meals was served to be licensed. Bars and eating places that had dwell music might function with no license, however provided that the music they introduced was “incidental” — which the legislation outlined as not more than three performers and three kinds of instrument on a stage without delay.
For years, membership homeowners and musicians had tried to repeal the ordinance. Mr. Sevigny got here up with the thought of a authorized problem on First Modification grounds.
A Manhattan Supreme Court docket decide dominated in two selections, in 1986 and 1988, for Mr. Sevigny’s plaintiffs — a vibraphonist, trumpeter and singer — that the Cabaret Legislation violated musicians’ rights to free expression. Mr. Sevigny turned a celeb in golf equipment round city.
Paul Graves Chevigny was born on July 12, 1935, in Seattle. His father, Hector Chevigny, was a author of radio performs. His mom, Claire (Graves) Chevigny, was a newspaper columnist and schoolteacher.
Mr. Chevigny graduated from Yale Faculty in 1957 and Harvard Legislation College in 1960. After 57 years of marriage, his spouse died in 2021. Along with his daughter Blue, he’s survived by one other daughter, Katy Chevigny, and two grandchildren.
In center age, Mr. Chevigny took up faucet dancing after watching a category one in every of his daughters was taking. He was impressed to revisit part of the Cabaret Legislation, which nonetheless stood, prohibiting dancing in bars and eating places with no license.
As soon as once more, he introduced go well with, arguing that dancing is free expression protected by the New York State Structure. The courtroom dominated towards Mr. Chevigny in 2006, though the decide urged lawmakers to take up the difficulty, writing, “Certainly, the Large Apple is sufficiently big to discover a approach to let folks dance.”
The Metropolis Council repealed the dance ban in 2017.
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